GUIDE TO THE PHILOSOPHY 1938 - 1947.pdf - Rare Books at ...

8UBJECTIVI8T THEORY OF ETHICS $77
features which are both peculiar, and common to the
various views surveyed in the later part of this chapter,
I append a passage taken from Lowes Dickinson's book
After Two Thousand Tears, 1 which admirably summarizes
the distinctive contentions of Subjectivism. This passage
appeals in support of Subjectivism to the results of recent
sciences such as biology and anthropology, and indicates
the reasons which have seemed to many to operate con-
clusively against objective
or absolutist theories of ethics.
"PLATO: You reject, then, the position which I remember
finding, in Athens, the most difficult to refute, that
of the sceptics who deny that there are any standards
prescribing Goods for everybody, or 'in themselves',
or whatever you would say, but only the opinions of
any individual man as to what he does in fact judge it
best to pursue. Have you no such school now?
PHILALETHSS: In my own country, as I have already
said, we are not philosophers, and it is impossible to
say what views people do really hold. But I should
say, from my own observation, that many of us do
in practice accept the sceptical view, so far and so
long as it spells advantage to ourselves; but if, or
when, it is turned against us by others, we fall back
on standards, declare our opponents to be immoral
men, and do our best to have them punished.
PLATO: Men's thoughts, so far as I can learn from you,
have not changed very much since my time. For
our sophists used to argue that a strong man, though
he would not accept the conventions of morality,
might support them as applied to others. 'They may
be useful to me,' he would admit, 'and so far must
be defended, but I may always break them, if this
use should cease.'
PHILALETHES: Your sophists were more dear in their
minds than are ordinary men. But many people do
certainly act on some such view.
1 See Chapter HI, p. 81, for an account of this book.